Rails 4 Authenticity Token

Question

I was working on a new Rails 4 app (on Ruby 2.0.0-p0) when I ran into some authenticity token problems.

While writing a controller that responds to json (using the respond_to class method), I got to the create action I started getting ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken exceptions when I tried to create a record using curl.

I made sure I set -H "Content-Type: application/json" and I set the data with -d "<my data here>" but still no luck.

I tried writing the same controller using Rails 3.2 (on Ruby 1.9.3) and I got no authenticity token problems whatsoever. I searched around and I saw that there were some changes with authenticity tokens in Rails 4. From what I understand, they are no longer automatically inserted in forms anymore? I suppose this is somehow affecting non-HTML content types.

Is there any way to get around this without having to request a HTML form, snatching the authenticity token, then making another request with that token? Or am I completely missing something that's completely obvious?

Edit: I just tried creating a new record in a new Rails 4 app using a scaffold without changing anything and I'm running into the same problem so I guess it's not something I did.

Answer 1

Instead of turn off the csrf protection, it's better to add the following line of code into the form

<%= tag(:input, :type => "hidden", :name => request_forgery_protection_token.to_s, :value => form_authenticity_token) %> 

and if you're using form_for or form_tag to generate the form, then it will automatically add the above line of code in the form